[sdnog] Puppet Configuration

[Nishal Goburdhan]

On 14 Oct 2015, at 17:28, Nishal Goburdhan wrote:
>> Hi Isra,
>>
>> Before we start to troubleshoot this - are you setting up a brand new 
>> Puppet Master?
>>
>> If so, I would strongly recommend that you start with Puppet 4: 
>> https://puppetlabs.com/blog/say-hello-open-source-puppet-4
>>
>> With Puppet 4, you get a simple, streamlined experience with an 
>> all-in-one (AIO) package that includes Puppet 4, latest Hiera and 
>> MCollective, Ruby, OpenSSL and their gem dependencies. This is most 
>> definitely going to give you less headaches later down the road, 
>> especially with the upgrade from Puppet 3 to Puppet 4.
>>
>> You're then also using the latest version of their software, the 
>> version 3 (which is what you likely installed) will be unsupported 
>> soon. A lot of things has changed, and the new AIO package is really 
>> great to get started with.
>>
>> Happy to guide you (and others) through the process of getting 
>> started with Puppet 4. It's a great time to start with Puppet, the 
>> Puppet Forge (where modules to configure web, mail, DNS servers) are 
>> very mature these days - they've put in a lot of work to make this 
>> great!
>>
>> Let me know, and I can type up some notes to get you started. Also, 
>> any reason you're using CentOS 6 and not yet CentOS 7?
>>
>> Jaco
>
> hi jaco,
>
> as a newcomer to puppet (heh!)  this is very interesting to me.
>
> my traditional approach is to “go with the old and stable”;  which 
> is why, when i look at a recent deployment that i have to work in, i 
> see that we’re using:
> me at puppet:~# apt --installed list | grep puppet
> puppet-common/trusty-updates,now 3.4.3-1ubuntu1.1 all 
> [installed,automatic]
> puppetmaster/trusty-updates,now 3.4.3-1ubuntu1.1 all [installed]
> puppetmaster-common/trusty-updates,now 3.4.3-1ubuntu1.1 all 
> [installed,automatic]
> (which, i believe is the default, at the time of writing, on ubuntu 
> 14.4LTS)
>
> i’ve since read part of the installation and migration guides on 
> puppet4, and i’m pleased to see that it’s not quite “bleeding 
> edge” new.  so that spells well.  i’ve tagged this onto my to-do 
> list for the medium term.  if you have some gotcha’s that you can 
> share for a future potential upgrade (ie. don’t do this;  it’ll 
> break that…) that will be very useful indeed.


so, a follow-up on this;  we now have a small, and incredibly useful (!) 
puppet deployment, managing about 60 servers.  i was looking into its 
extensibility, and, re-read your notes on puppet 4.  i see that ubuntu 
16.4 (the next LTS) is not yet slated to include puppet 4 (but 3.8, 
instead).

so, knowing that most folk prefer to stick with the “default OS 
install” (and not to make this a puppet-support list) but i was 
curious if your advice on moving to puppet 4, would still hold in this 
case?
ultimately, yes, it’s a personal choice, whether to install from the 
standard ubuntu repository, or to include the puppet repository instead, 
but it seems that the canonical/ubuntu-team seem to think that 3.8 is 
still the way to stay.   your thoughts ?

—n.